Who is Changpeng Zhao (CZ)? From hamburgers to crypto money...
Binance founder Zhao has been on the agenda lately. Zhao stated that FTX asked for help from Binance on November 8 and announced that they planned to purchase FTX. While the parties signed a letter of intent for Binance to purchase FTX, Binance announced that it had given up purchasing FTX shortly after the negotiations started. FTX declared bankruptcy shortly after. This week, Zhao is on the agenda with his messages of "rebuilding" the industry. So, who is Zhao?
According to the company's blog posts, Zhao was born in China in 1977, lived in Anhui province, and immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1989 at the age of 12.
Zhao, who also goes by the initials CZ, spent his youth in Vancouver and worked at McDonald's to support his family.
According to Binance, he learned about bitcoin during a poker game in 2013 and then devoted his life to crypto.
After studying computer science at McGill University, he worked on trading software for the Tokyo Stock Exchange and Bloomberg.
Zhao launched Binance in China in July 2017 and gradually grew it into the world's largest crypto exchange.
Like other exchanges, Binance has faced significant regulatory hurdles around the world in recent years, including a ban in the United Kingdom and other restrictions in countries including Canada.
Zhao describes his biography in a blog: "On August 6, 1989, my mother and I left China and immigrated thousands of miles away to Canada. I was 12 years old. My parents were teachers/professors at one of China's top four universities at the time." We lived on the campus of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei. It changed my life forever and opened endless possibilities for me. I spent the best years of my youth in Vancouver and then went to McGill in Montreal for university.
After that, I worked for a few years in Tokyo and New York (Bloomberg). In 2005, the web technology industry was booming in China, so I went to Shanghai with five other immigrants to start an IT company; two Americans, two Brits, one Japanese and me a Canadian. Since none of us are Chinese citizens, the company was designated as a "Wholly Owned Foreign Enterprise" (WOFE).
Between 2005 and 2015, I tried to launch several different startup projects before finally entering the crypto space. Before I realized my passion, I was a serial entrepreneur looking to build a successful start-up. Two years before Binance, I founded a company called Bijie Tech, which provides exchange platforms as a service to other exchanges. We have 30 customers and business was good. Mostly art shopping and stamps, baseball cards, etc. Unfortunately, in March 2017, the Chinese government closed all such exchanges.
All of our customers went bankrupt. Later, the idea for Binance would begin to take shape. "It was a simple idea that a more streamlined crypto exchange could provide a smoother user experience without sacrificing useful features."
According to an article on CNN, Zhao discussed some of the company's challenges, saying that as a Chinese-born business leader, he faced extreme suspicion, and because he is ethnically Chinese, he was seen as an easy target for the media and some policymakers who hated the industry. “I am a Canadian citizen, period,” Zhao says.
Zhao added that as of September, Binance had subsidiaries in countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.
